18 Things (2 page)

His shirt buttons dug into my hands, but I didn’t dare loosen my grip. The pain became distant as a part of my mind played the
what if
game: what if Conner died? What if I died? What if we both died?

The black void of the storm eclipsed my senses of time and space, but I knew the surface couldn’t be much farther now. I kept my eyes on the red blur floating just above my head and gripped him tighter, reaching. In a frenzy of gasping, splashing, and screaming, I scrambled to pull him up. Draping Conner over the lifebuoy, I pushed and swam.

The wind cut steadily at my arms and face. The blue-gray froth lapped at my head, constantly covering Conner’s body. My throat grew thick from trying not to cry. Tears streamed in my vision as I lost the battle, and I gripped Conner tighter around the lifebuoy. The realization this might be the last time I ever held Conner threatened to drown us both, but the task of saving him was mine alone. I would save Conner.

I had to.

Nothing but darkness stretched across the horizon as my numb limbs moved through the water toward our boat. I wasn’t just fighting the current now but myself too. My arms were so stiff they wouldn’t move. The lake was a black hole into which every sound, every sight, every feeling had been sucked.

Only two kicks away
, I kept telling myself, until it was finally true. I reached out and placed a hand against the smooth wood of our sailboat, an anchor in this storm.

I climbed aboard, clutching the string attached to the buoy so Conner wouldn’t float away. The wind howled like a pack of wolves, and I turned my back to it. I retrieved his phone out of his backpack, then punched 9-1-1. The call took three attempts, my fingers fumbling as my body rocked violently with shivers. Cold so intense I wished I was the one knocked unconscious.

Barely able to form words, I forced myself to shout to the operator over the pounding rain. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and my hearing was muffled as though I was still underwater. I tried deciphering the woman’s response over the line and dug in the backpack for my inhaler, coughing and wheezing. When I couldn’t find it, I laughed deliriously, imagining the stupid headline. “Girl Survives Lightning Strike and Near Drowning but Dies From Asthma Attack.”

I glanced at Conner and noticed he wasn’t breathing.

At all.

I dropped the phone inside the backpack and risked flipping the boat by pulling him up. The fourteen-footer tilted and swayed and almost dumped me. Breath floated around me as I panted from exertion. My mind flashed to when Conner and I were kids, obsessed with seeing our own air in winter. We’d down hot chocolate and run outside, blowing ‘smoke’ out of our mouths. Now, I couldn’t believe I had any warmth left in me to cause this phenomenon. One arm clung to the boat, the other to Conner as I hauled him up, falling backwards. His body collapsed on top of me. His face was chalk colored as if he was dead.

I flipped him over. His flannel shredded, I briskly rubbed my knuckles over his chest, trying to wake him as my heart pounded.

No response.

I checked for a pulse on his neck… faint but there. I opened his airway, tilted his head, and put my ear to his mouth.

No airflow.

No chest movement.

I pinched his nose and administered a rescue breath—big enough to make his chest rise. Watched his chest fall. Repeated.

His lips were blue. Each breath of my own was agony. I couldn’t feel a good portion of my body as I repositioned his head and repeated. The rain stopped as suddenly as it came. The only sound was water lapping against the boat. I knew this sound would haunt me the rest of my life.

Despite my shortness of breath, I repeatedly blew into his mouth. I heard voices. Maybe I was hallucinating from lack of oxygen. I struggled again to draw in breath, but I valued his life more than mine. So I repeated. Every five seconds, like clockwork.

This is not how I imagined our lips touching for the first time
. Something knocked me hard in the back of the head, and I faded away into darkness as horizon gave way to light. I didn’t know if it was Heaven or our rescue.

My mother helped me into the wheelchair. The ambulance ride and my time at the hospital blurred together. Had minutes passed? Hours?

“You’re going to be okay, Olga,” a nurse reassured me. “We’ve taken care of your hypothermia, but you need an MRI and—”

Someone screamed, loud and bloodcurdling.

I glanced into the trauma room across the hall and spotted Loria on her knees. Robert fell next to her and held his arms around her shaking frame.

Conner was lying still on a table.

Too still. His body, except for his head, covered by a sheet.

“No, no, no!” I tried to stand, but the nurse restrained me, instructing me to stay calm. “But that’s my best friend!” My arms flailed. “
Conner
!”

I wailed until his parents looked at me, and their sneers shocked me into silence.

Conner’s death was my fault.

I should’ve realized he wasn’t breathing sooner. I replayed the accident in my mind. Should I have called 9-1-1 first, or gotten him out of the water and started CPR right away? Was it the lightning that killed him, or did he have hypothermia like me?

The doctor in the trauma room closed the door.

Mom and Dad wrapped their arms around me.

“What happened?” I pleaded. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie.” Dad touched a finger to my forehead and swept a piece of hair behind my ear.

I hit his hand away, and he shuffled back a step or two.

The nurse wheeled me toward a row of chairs against a wall, out of the way from other nurses and doctors rushing around the ER.

“We didn’t want to tell you until we knew you’d be okay,” Dad explained. “Conner was already in cardiac arrest when they brought him here. They’ve been working on him for the past hour, but the doctor just came out and said there’s nothing more they can do. A respirator is keeping him breathing for now, but he’s brain dead.”

I placed a hand over my heart, checking to see if it was still beating. It was, but how could I be alive when Conner wasn’t?

“You wanted to wait until you knew I’d be okay?” I echoed his words back to him, sobbing. “I’ll never be okay again. Conner’s my best friend!”

I buried my face in my hands, and my body rocked again. From grief this time, not cold.

“We know, honey. We know.” Mom rubbed my arm, crying with me.

“You
don’t
know. I wanted him to see me as more than his nerdy best friend. And it might’ve been working. He flirted with me on our sail earlier. I had my chance to tell him how I really feel. But I didn’t. I was gonna tell him I love him at prom next week instead. How can this be happening? How can this be God’s plan?”

Dad frowned and took my hands in his. I yanked my hands away, then put them on the wheels of my chair and pushed myself toward the trauma room.

“Olga!” Nicole ran through the ER’s front entrance with Sean and Kyle behind her. “Thank God you’re okay. We heard a news report that a seventeen-year-old was killed after being struck by lightning while sailing on Lake Michigan, so we drove to the hospital, worried it was—” She stopped short. “Is Conner okay?”

The question felt like a punch to the face and I gripped the sides of my head, squeezing my eyes shut as the tears fell.

“Oh God,” Nicole whispered, pulling me into a hug.

“Jesus!” Sean shouted. “No!” Kyle screamed, his eyes bulging, looking from me to Conner’s parents.

The words of our friends exploded around the room like bombs. Loria and Robert stood and staggered toward us.

But my mission was the same. “Can I go in and see him?”

Loria’s breathing was uneven. She pulled a hand through her hair in the same manner Conner often did and then silently slumped into a plastic chair against the wall.

Robert tugged his horn-rimmed glasses to the edge of his nose and peered down at me.

“What—?” He broke down in tears, unable to finish his sentence.

I knew he wanted to ask what happened. But there’d be time for that later.

He nodded a slight yes before joining Loria, dropping his head on her tiny shoulder. Her face was a mixture of sadness, anger, confusion, and hatred. Hatred directed toward me, but I wheeled my chair into their son’s room anyway.

Nicole tried to push me from behind.

“No.” My voice was firm. “I want to go in alone.”

I slowly approached the bed; the smell of disinfectant in the air made me nauseous. The sounds of the monitors weren’t loud, but they were impossible to ignore. Tears formed in my eyes. A thousand conversations whirled in my head, made me dizzier. Discussions of our future, studying for and taking the SAT’s, searching the web for the colleges we might attend, talking about how cool it’d be for his band to score a record deal and for me to land a scholarship. All these words seemed bittersweet now. I grabbed his hand. It was already cold to the touch even though those must’ve been third degree burns, and I wondered what his internal body temperature was compared to mine.

Did I kill him
?
Why did I pick today to go sailing? I knew the answer. I was jealous Conner asked Tammy, the head cheerleader, to prom today. I wanted to make her jealous in return by proving I could go on a ‘date’ with him whenever I wanted.

I stared down at his lifeless hand; a couple fingernails were missing. Maybe they were blown off by the impact, but I couldn’t focus on that or I’d puke again. I stood and placed my other hand on top of the sheet, where I thought his heart would be, and closed my eyes.

“Jesus, please bring Conner back. Please, don’t take him. I need him more than I need life. I refuse to accept this. You said we can ask anything in your name and it will be given. I’m asking you this now—no, begging. Please, God, please.” When I opened my eyes, Conner’s vacant expression stared back at me, his usual easy smile gone. I shook him, pounded on his chest. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Little red dots littered his pale face. I had them, too. The nurse said they were from capillaries bursting underneath the skin. I wondered how his tan could’ve disappeared so quickly. His eyebrows were singed. A bald spot stretched across the top of his head, a red circle resembling a giant hickey taking the place where hair used to be. I guessed this was where the lightning struck him and remembered the flash of flames before the electricity flung him off our boat.

It was probably too late for this to be a Lazarus and Jesus situation, but I still couldn’t let Conner go. I decided to bargain with God.

“Okay, can we make a trade? Him for me? This is my fault. Please, do anything to me, but don’t take him. I understand if you need another soul or something, but why not me? Or maybe this is my wakeup call? I promise to do better, God. I’ll only think good thoughts. I’ll help the poor, the orphans, and the widows. Please forgive me, but don’t punish Conner. And, please, help me to be mindful of your presence from this day forward. I beg for your presence now. Jesus, please raise Conner from the dead.” I counted to thirty in my head, tears streaming down my face.

Nothing.

“Please, God! I’ll become a nun after graduation or a missionary in Africa. Anything you want, God.”

I whispered those last four words over and over again until Dad’s hands gently squeezed my shoulders. “Other people need to say goodbye.”

There was nothing left for me to do, except… I leaned down and whispered in his ear. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’ll spend the rest of my life loving you. I wish I would’ve told you sooner. I wish I could take your place right now. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”